Martha Hayward, Lead for Public and Patient Engagement, Institute for Healthcare Improvement

Empathy is not the same thing as sympathy. In the first instance, we feel seen and truly heard; sympathy tends to maintain a distance between two people, often deliberately so. One of the best explanations of the distinction, and why empathy can be so much more powerful, is an online video narrated by human vulnerability expert Dr. Brené Brown. And then there’s the Cleveland Clinic’s video about empathy, directed at health professionals. This moving reminder of the stories behind the faces of patients that pass through health care every day has been viewed on YouTube over a million times.

Why the seemingly sudden need to draw the attention of doctors and nurses to the humanness of the patients before them? Is it because, as some fear, empathy is becoming harder and harder for health professionals to feel or express in the course their jobs? Could be, but there’s nothing inexorable about the loss of empathy in health care today. And, as we’ll learn on the April 10 WIHI: Reclaiming Empathy: Best Practices for Engaging with Patients, there are effective ways to help today’s busy and often overwhelmed caregivers reconnect with their own feelings and the feelings of others, namely their patients.

At the Cleveland Clinic, Stacie Pallotta is part of a team that’s looking at empathy as one important part of an overall strategy to improve patient experience. Dr. Helen Riess, who specializes in the neuroscience of emotions, is turning her findings into “empathy education” for health professionals. She’s also found that if students’ empathy towards patients tends to erode over the course of their medical training, as evidence suggests, new research shows that additional training can either disrupt or reverse this process.

Is there something that patients and families can do if the doctors and nurses and staff they encounter are having a bad day or are so stressed by being pulled in million different directions that they can’t seem to register much more than a weak smile? We’ll ask IHI’s lead for public and patient engagement, Martha Hayward, that question. And we want to know what you think, too. Please join us for this discussion about the value of empathy and human connection to improving health and health care, on the April 10 WIHI.